


corrugated teeth

by tnevmucric



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: M/M, based on giovanni's room by james baldwin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 15:38:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15561000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnevmucric/pseuds/tnevmucric
Summary: love him. love him and let him love you. do you think anything else really matters?





	corrugated teeth

With everything in me screaming _'No!’_ , the sum of me sighed _'Yes’_. The sun started to melt into my shirt and my hair curled around my ears; the park was a rigid misery at this time of year and everything was enveloped in either dripping ice water or freshly blanketed snow. My shoes were muddy from the defrosting grass and my hands shook very barely. My veins were like spider webs, crawling up the expanse of my blemished forearms. 

He had awakened an itch, and released a gnaw in me. I realised it one afternoon, leaving Paddy’s with him arm in arm and Dee still screaming at me as the doors swung shut. We bought a kilo of cherries and were eating them as we walked along; insufferably childish with the unfamiliar presence of guilt dragging my feet, he made me laugh (or at least squint my eyes in a smile) with cherry-pip spitting and his careless banter. We were two grown men, jostling each other on the sidewalk and I could forget about smashing the bar glasses and drinks for at least the fifteen minutes it took to get to the playground. For now, I realised that this dampened joy which sprang from his throat and eyes, threatening to drag me under, was exactly what I needed. And for these moments I could let myself really love Mac, who had never seemed more beautiful than he did there.

He reached out and pet my arm, his callouses not to dissimilar to the striking surface of a matchbox. Heat climbed my throat and I cleared it, tightening my own fingers around my hands. I felt guilty and in love and in pain and for what wasn’t the first time and probably won’t be the last, I wanted to beat the shit out of Mac. And Dee. And Charlie and Frank and anyone who made a noise towards me in the last hour. His hand stayed still and I sniffed against the cold. The bag of remaining cherries sat at our feet.

“Thanks”, I finally said, the swings we were sat on creaked at our weight. “I swear I was about to hit her.”

Mac shrugged easily and pulled away, his swing twirling and arms folding. “Dee’s a bitch. She shouldn’t have pushed you, she knows how you-”

“How I what?”, I spit, already feeling a snarl gather in my throat. I regretted it immediately, slamming my hand to my forehead and huffing. “Mac-”

“I know”, Mac waves my outburst off easily, “It’s fine. You didn’t mean it.”

“Mac.”

“I know.”

We sit quietly after that and I kick at the sloshing snow, faint memories of last winter and the winter before that grabbing my focus. 

“Do you think I should apologise to Dee?”

Mac’s breath comes out in white clouds and I’m holding my breath so tight that I don’t try. He rubs his nose on his sleeve and quirks his lips a little, an acknowledgement.

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Then yeah”, he watches me, just in his periphery then rolls his neck side to side, sighing and turning in the swing: feet dug in the ground so he doesn’t move. “She’s an asshole who knows what buttons to push but you were the asshole first, Den. You usually are.” I shoot him a glare but he just smiles. “Apologise and don’t dance around it like you usually do. Try the words _‘I’m sorry’_. You’ll probably make her day.”

“I’m not sorry, though”, I admit. “I’m just... guilty.”

“The two usually go hand in hand”, he reaches down to the cherry bag and pops one in his mouth, sitting back up and pointing a stem at me. “And it’ll fester if you leave it, so do it when you get back. What even started it? Charlie’s the one who called me out when you started throwing stuff.”

I clench my jaw, licking my lips quickly and squaring my shoulders. “Usual bullshit.”

He’s too nice. Too wildly gentle and dangerous all at once like snapping fingers and coin flippers. I am a star, he must think softly. Just add water.

“Dee should be back at the apartment around now”, Mac stands and crunches the cherry bag between his fingers, faint spurts of red staining the brown paper. “I’ll walk you.”

I frown as I stand, “You aren’t going to stay?” He fixes me with that smile again: all eyes.

“Someone’s gotta help Charlie clean up and I think you and Dee need to have a long talk. Am I right?”

He outstretches an arm towards me. Am I meant to take it? And if I am, do I take his hand? Do I just nod?

“You’re being too nice to me”, I state, the frown on my face a more exasperated miserable. “Why are you being nice to me, Mac?”

In his smile, it’s like he says _'You know why’_. Instead, he lets out a light laugh with the shake of his head.

“I’m always nice to you, Den.”

He links our arms together and I let my lips fold into a flat line. Despite our heights, my body crumbles into his side; my face embarrassingly in the space of his neck and shoulder as we walk. 

“Want a drink?”

Dee doesn’t look at me as she brings out two glasses from the cupboard under the sink, rifling through another for what is probably the bottle of bourbon me and Mac finished last month when she wasn’t home. The guilt only grows and I dig my nails into my palms: if I get it over with I won’t have to do it again. If I get it over with I won’t have to do it again.

“Dee-”

“Come here. Sit down.”

“I-”

“I know, Den. Just come sit.”

Dee pulls herself up onto the counter and pats the space next to her, swinging her feet against the cupboards. She looks tired, I think, and there’s a band-aid on her knee. I toe my shoes off by the door and inch myself up next to her, tucking my arms around myself and slumping.

“Dee, I-”

“You’re sorry, I know. So am I. We both said things we shouldn’t have, I forgive you.”

I nod but the weight in my torso doesn’t feel lighter. I shift at each small tick in my body and Dee looks distressed, picking at her lilac nails.

“Do you forgive me?”, she asks worriedly. “When Mac walked in I felt bad straight away and-”

I shake my head. “It’s fine. Let’s forget about it.”

“I’m sorry, Dennis.”

“Me too.” My tongue stung at the words: so close yet so far from proper remorse. Dee rested her head on my shoulder and my face curled, my fingers clenching into fists and my lungs begging for a break. 

I can remember the last time I cried.

“I care about Mac a lot, Dee”, my jaw quivers. “I’m- it makes me want to puke.”

I cover my face, trying to stop the inevitable but only smearing my mascara in the process. Dee is quiet for once and I’m thankful. Slowly, she rubs my arm.

“I know.”

“He’s like a-a fucking nightmare and wet dream all at once”, I laugh tearfully. “I’m disgusting. I’m so disgusting.”

“You wanna love him.”

“I do.” And I can’t stop shaking. “I already do. I just... I don’t know _how_. I don’t know how.” And I can’t stop shaking.          

She strokes my hair in a way that isn’t comforting at all but there isn’t enough space move. The apartment is quiet and dead and Dee has a rotting carcass on her kitchen counter—I wonder if she can smell me. Dying, slowly, like a dagger has been left in my skin. Tetanus is a friend. My hands spasm around each other and I cry harder, snot smearing around my nose and chin and ruining what was a twenty-five-minute paint job. I cry harder. I cry until I can’t feel at all.

A frail sense of urgency sweeps across Philadelphia in the form of sienna skies the next Monday morning. The familiar bleed of commuting cars shakes the square window sills and I curl my toes in borrowed socks; the world is at a quiet and odd peace yet teeters on the edge of eerie. Dee’s bed isn’t comfy. There’s a broken compact mirror on the floor and musty, discarded clothes from the remains of a week.

I’ve been fervently unaware of how comfortable safety can be. I’ve almost always hidden myself in familiar confines in order to distract what could be any sense of _homely_. Whether that be the irritating itch of work or hiding in the supply closet, it seems I am surely sinking into life at an alarming pace anyway. When I was with Mac it didn't seem quite quick enough.

Reaching out one arm, I let my skin waver in the sunshine entering the room: a little grateful for Dee. Yesterday's heavy words and footsteps padded down the hall and I closed my eyes. For just a moment (too quickly and too fast), the sun simmered. 

The creak of the door opening made me jump and I rolled my head to one side, recognising the outline of Mac’s shadow: a lazy silhouette with a drawn curve in his hip. Mac stared with a somewhat empty expression that I could only see the wrinkles of and I felt too vulnerable to even meet his eyes. I looked back to the sun.

"It's too early for you to be awake." 

"I know", I began gently. "I was..."

"Distracted?"

"Yeah, distracted." My eyes caught the corner of Dee’s slippers which barely tucked under the bed. "Did you come back last night?"

"No", Mac answers faintly. "I kept Charlie company. Thought you and Dee might’ve needed the privacy anyway—like some family time."

“You’re family.”

Kept alive by what could only be a kind of fiendish, fatal curiosity since my teens, I breathed uncomfortably: the edge of my thumb hooked between my crooked teeth and a nail peeled away with a faint spot of red. Looking past the penetrative fondness Mac upheld in my presence was too hard and it was too easy to see where this was going. No matter how hard I scrubbed, with any amounts of soap we had ( _Atomic Tangerine, 99 cents at Dollar Tree_ ), it was like predetermination would forever be instilled in my workings. There are four options, my head would ring, and you can't choose three.

Maybe one day, we could live in a house with a garden and in need of a repaint. At first glance, everything had always seemed just as it had in high school- easy codependency. Give and take. That made yesterday feel like a burning iron rod down my throat; more often than not I’ve found myself sighing gently at a pair of shoes or meaningless scrap of paper Mac’s left behind or how he leaves the windows always open and smiling after five. My fingers don’t know how to drive my body anymore and I feel like following the headlights that call me at night. I think too much.

_Do you know how heartwarming it is inside your skin?_ I want to whisper. We stare at each other across a narrow space that is full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like dying lions.

“I missed you”, he said. “Last night.”

Finding as much strength as I could in this lackluster, morning haze and daily, brimming reiteration of anxiety, I pulled my hand away from his mouth and rolled over, away from the sun, holding out that hand to Mac. Would he take it? Would he hold it? Or would he just nod? 

He climbs into Dee’s bed with me and I keep thinking there’s a man right here who keeps bringing me rain but I’ve been sending up prayers and something’s changed. _Something’s changed._

He holds onto me like I mean something.

There is a glitter that dances on Mac's skin (like the nights he'd come back to Dee's covered in a wash of saliva like a marker saying _'faggot here'_ ) that is suddenly dulled as the sun is covered by fast passing clouds. Decades have washed out what was once perfect porcelain but I still like it, and I carefully sit my ear to his chest. His heart adores me, I think. And if I listen hard enough I can hear it speaking.

“I’m a mess”, I admit. “I’m really a mess. All of the time.”

Mac breathes out a laugh and his hand curls at the nape of my neck: it’s comforting.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah”, I prop myself up on my chin and look up at him. “But of all that, when I’m with you it’s... it’s like _less_ bad. Mac stop laughing at me, you know-”

“I know how you are”, he cuts in, grinning cheekily. I want to hide in whatever disgusting feeling this is except it I know I’ll enjoy it. He makes me smile wildly. “But please, don’t stop on my account, man. I wanna hear you wax poetic about me.”

“Mac, please.”

“I get it”, Mac tells me, “Really, I do. I’ve seen your worst days and all of that shit, I’ve had the fair share of glasses ditched at my head, but I don’t care, Den. You’re the most exciting thing I’ve ever known and I feel the same", his heart collapses in effulgent beats, "You know that. You’ve always known that.”

I lick my lips. “You’re... you sound like a walking blog post.” Mac grins again.

“Didn’t you know? I'm all about flowers, fresh fruit and generous love right now.”

“That sounds like a middle-aged mom going through her third crisis.”

“All for you, baby.”

I laugh into his chest and he smiles fondly at me. These moments are something bordering on precious, I think. And they dance with the word _safe._ When I look up again he brushes his thumb over my cheekbone, tracing something there that I’m too tired to decipher. I close my eyes.

“Mac, I’m... I’m still not... I still don’t know how to do _this_ ”, I squeeze my eyes tighter, feeling his hand still. “I’m not sure I...”

“That’s okay”, another touch wills me to look up and he smiles. So, so kind. If this had happened on another day, I’d tear myself down at this comfortable space. I’d throw plates in his face and kick at his knees, saying horrible things that _maybe I actually did mean._ “Just... will you let me kiss you? I really want to kiss you.”                                                       

For those in similar situations, I think (and I think desperately of me. I grasp at old skeletons wanting to drive into trees), it’s alright. You have done enough. He kisses me and he is blinding. I love him as much as ever and I still don’t know how much that is.


End file.
